Here are three of seven photos of what I believe are the same camping trip. My initial reaction is always that they look rather coddled, lounging around in ways that resemble a stay in a hotel. But then I try to imagine erecting that enormous canvas tent and hauling around that furniture, and I realize that at least somebody was working pretty hard to make it a pleasant experience.

By the way, I remember camping in those big cabin tents. All the poles that you had to assembly, it was a real nightmare! Fortunately, I was a child and I didn’t have to do it. I tried one as an adult…it took hours and I would have abandoned the idea completely but I needed it for my students to sleep in. After that went strictly to dome tents. Even a six year old can put up a dome tent in less than fifteen minutes.

I was wondering if this might be a heavily touristed site where the setting up of tents may be a service that comes with renting a camping spot. Maybe even the tent and furniture and things are provided by the site. I don’t really know. But I guess it’s my own bias, assuming that the people pictured here might be too leisurely in general to be working that hard, when no doubt they’re perfectly suited to the tasks at hand.

My experience is that people put up their own tents. I have never seen services where others put the tents up. Camping was a big leisure activity and many who did camp were used to hard work. The leisure only comes after the tent is up. Also, people would camp for weeks at a time. Nowadays, it’s not uncommon to go camping for a weekend. When my daughter was very young we frequently went overnight camping. Dome tents allow those king of quick get-a-ways. Cabin tents take to long to put up. Oh, many people had cots in their cabin tents…for comfort! 🙂

Yes, I had similar experiences as a child in the 1970s, when my family would go on long road trips. We stayed in campsites and had to set up a big canvas tent at every stop. We had aluminum cots that went inside. We certainly did all that ourselves. I just wondered if, back when these photos were taken, there might have been a high-end sort of place like Yosemite that might have offered more than just do-it-yourself plots of land. In any case, as you said, if people were camping for weeks at a time, the labor at the beginning and end would have been worth it for the pleasures it afforded during the rest of the trip.